Just wait until you encounter a truly numinous event and your dreams are haunted. Then you'll wish you had some Jung-fu....

Thanks. I keep telling myself I'll read one SEP article a day, but some are pretty wrong and the random article button has sent me to some places so really don't care about. This'll be more up my alley.

It's also a useful dichotomy for examining the history of the philosophy of science, since the scientific method reached maturity almost entirely in the West.

Another distinction I've heard is that Eastern Philosophy tends to be more practical, talking about how to live. "Practical" as in, it tells you how you should practice.

It's a useful dichotomy because the different traditions weren't in regular conversation with each other for thousands of years.

Yes, Eastern and Western philosophy did have some crossovers. The idea of the transmigration of souls may have reached Greece from India (this is not totally clear), and the original intellect/world dualism of the Greeks is close enough to what has survived in Hindu thought (as opposed to subjective/objectives dualism), that we can suppose a link.

That said, Hindu philosophers, and those further East, do not quote and continually refer back to Plato for centuries. Western Philosphers do. Indeed, the issues brought up by the pre-Socratics, Plato, and Aristotle reoccur , mentioned by name, over and over throughout the development of Western thought. These references and conversations don't occured in Eastern thought. They had their own key ideas that recurred and spread throughout India and East Asia.

The impact of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam is also central to Western thought, while Buddhist thought (and through it Hindu) suffused Eastern Philosophy.

It's probably more useful to talk of Western thought due to the recognized cannon and continual dialogue between current thinkers and old ones. "Western thought" doesn't overlap with current conceptions of the West, since it includes Muslim scholars who lived in Central Asia. It's all about the grounding in the same arguments, going back to Ancient Greece (further really, Plato's Theory of Forms shows up in Memphite Theology in Ancient Egypt centuries before he formalized it).

Eastern Philosophy is much trickier to define. The common thread is influence going from India and out into East Asia. There was, of course, influence in the other direction, but not as strong. Indian thought remained more isolated from Chinese thought that Western and Eastern European thought. So it's less useful to think of Eastern Philosophy as its own tradition, but it certainly reflects a different set of traditions.

The analogy I heard from a professor is that it is more useful to think of Eastern Philosophy as conferences at three hotels, one in India, one in China, and one smaller on in Japan. Attendees sometimes travel between the hotels and give speech's explaining new ideas they learned, but they are still different conferences. Western philosophy is more like one big conference. Aquinas and the scholastics read and comment directly in Maimonides and Avicenna at length, there isn't a separation.

I'd say Descartes is the beginning of modern mind -body dualism, but Aristotle and Medieval philosophers distinguish the intellect, that function capable of observing and understanding mathematics, logic, etc., from the sensations of the body, emotions, and passions, all of which Descartes puts on the mind side of the divide.

This is somewhat in line with Hindu thought, where Atman is only that which observes, and Prakrati encompasses emotions and qualia as much as it does external material objects, such as a rock.

Looking further back, Homer's shades and Hebrew Sheol posit a unity of mind and body, with the animating soul, or breath being what divides life and death. That is, man is not sperate from his body, even in the afterlife. Indeed, this is more the view of Heaven we get in Revaluations than the folk Heaven of immaterial bodies popular today.


More "religious" Platonists and Gnostics got around this problem by seeing the entire material world as illusory. Only the internal world and forms were real.

The hylomorphism of Aristotle also addresses the mind-body problem, and modified hylomorphic views are still popular today.

I think it's not so much that they didn't recognize the problem, they just hadn't defined its edges as well, something modern science has done for us.

They also had bigger fish to fry, considering you had philosophers variously contending that any change was impossible, while others argued everything was flux. You need to agree on some building blocks of reality before you can even make it to mind body problems.

You're correct if you expand the definition of "pleasure" under hedonism to "everything that is good." It seems like you're expanding your definition too far in that case though. "Everyone should seeks that which is good, and what is good is pleasurable," doesn't ring true to me.

If pleasure is your only unit of analysis, then everything will seem to lead back to that, but I don't think it's that simple.

I'm a big fan of the American and internet meme versions of these I've found.

I have a very basic question: how readable is Wittgenstein? I am familiar with his ideas from various summaries I've read and Great Courses lectures I've bought, but never read him outside short excerpts that lack context.

I have a backlog of very dense reading to get through. I didn't know if it would be like adding more Hegel to that backlog, or if it'd be more straight forward (I find Plato and Aristotle fairly straight forward for example, even if the ideas are very complex and require mulling over).

The idea that God is good is often taken to mean God posseses no darkness. Indeed, Saint John contrasts the Light with the Darkness in the Gospel and his epistles.

However, we also take from John that God is the logos, word. As Sausser points out, a one word language, where a single term can equally be applied to all things, is not a language. It cannot convey meaning. In the same way, we cannot speak of a world of only Light, because Light only has meaning in relationship to Darkness.

Thus, I believe we can find darkness within God. We hear of God experiencing anger in the Bible. He "hates" in Amos. God encompasses all things. God is like a wavelength of infinite frequency. As the frequency increases, the peaks and troughs of the wave grow even closer, until the end result would be cancelation. For a sound wave, this would be silence, but a pregnant silence, filled with infinite potentiality.

Jung has a relevant experience in his autobiography. During his childhood, Jung was possesed of an overwhelming compulsion to blaspheme the Holy Spirit. He also had been taught that this was the one thing that caused eternal damnation. He resisted the compulsion, afraid to finish his thought. However, upon reflection, he realized this desire did not come from him, as it was something he absolutely did not want to do, but must come from somewhere else, from God. He finished his thought of blasphemy, and then immediately felt relief and the grace of God. It was this grace, from Darkness, that was the true essence of Christianity for him. God made Adam and Eve to sin, but their sin was required for grace.

This is the theological felix culpa- the Fall was required for the Crucifixion.

A God of only light is meaningless, like the one word language. God's creation of meaning required sin. God is perfect, and so It's partial emanations are inheritally imperfect. We see this in the Gnostics' conception of the Pleroma. God's emanations must exist in pairs, much like Heraclitus' tension of opposites. We can only grasp aspects of God in our mind, only part of the balanced whole. Since the parts are imperfect, not the perfectly balanced whole, we will by definition see fault in God.

God exists outside time. Perfect knowledge of the future would be no different from experiencing the future. All existence occurs at once. Sin is a problem for us because we only see a sliver of the picture, not knowing that there is no distance between the Fall and the Heavenly Kingdom. Indeed, a close reading of Paul and Christ in the Gospels show that we are already in the Kingdom today, as we live on Earth, through God's grace. Hell, the speration from God, can also be upon us even as we live.

Or, to sum up, the "problem of sin" is not a problem of contradiction, but a problem of our frame of reference. We are like Parmenides, thinking Achilles can never overtake the hare, because our reference is wrong.

Several things that I can be sure of. The call that fouled out Paul Pierce in Game Seven of the 2010 NBA finals was total garbage, and was what allowed the Lakers to squeak by to win by four points.

GGG definitely did not lose to Canelo, and was robbed of his undefeated record. At best for Canelo, he got a draw in the first fight, and lost in the second. Glovokin still has never had even a knee touch the mat in a fight, Canelo got knocked to the ground in that same fight.

Interesting question. I'm assuming you don't age, but aren't invulnerable. Do you still need food and water to live? If so, I might abstain for the same reason I eat very little meat or dairy. The pill might be good for the individual, but everyone doing it would result in a catastrophy. Imagine the increase in pollution, resource scarcity, and wars over resource scarcity produced by immortality.

Being young forever is appealing. You hit peak cognitive processing power in your early 20s, but lack the knowledge to take full advantage of it. You have more energy, fewer pains. I'd love it. That said, all men walking around with early 20s testosterone levels would also result in negative consequences.

Maybe 80 years is enough. Or maybe aging is a transition that makes it easier to leave at the end of your life. I'm not sure, but 160 years of youth would certainly give me a lot more career flexibility.

If it made you immortal and indestructible, the answer is definitely no. Sounds like Hell.

Your description is quite good, but I don't think it follows that the reasons are reducible to hedonism. For example, my wife has grown in her faith and experienced "joy" in knowing her brother was at peace after his suicide. That doesn't mean anything about the experience was desired or pleasant. It's a joy in faith, which is qualitatively different from, and often absent in pleasant experiences.

When Paul talks about being indifferent to life or death in Philippians, a letter written from prison, he isn't talking about pleasant qualia, but an enlightened state of faith outside such things. It's hard to say these things reduce to positive experience, especially since Paul and Peter did not recant as they were variously beheaded and crucified. A longing for execution does not seem hedonistic to me.

From Philippians I, 21-23

"For to me to live is Christ, and to die is gain. If I am to live in the flesh, that means fruitful labor for me. Yet which I shall choose I cannot tell. I am hard pressed between the two. My desire is to depart and be with Christ, for that is far better. But to remain in the flesh is more necessary on your account."

There are four reasons.

I. The practical material. It's a tough world and the weak are trampled under foot. Negative feedback works as a learning mechanism, oftentimes better than positive stimuli. If you don't learn to grind, or to stand up for yourself in uncomfortable stations, embracing negative feelings, you'll end up worse off in the long run.

II. Human's positive feedback mechanisms adapt over time, requiring greater stimuli for an equal subjective experience. Chasing hedonism can land you in a world of hurt.

III. Connected to II, joy, versus happiness, requires long term psychological development (dare I say spiritual at times). This is work. Philosophy is work. Confronting your past can be negative. Opening up emotionally and being vulnerable is like pulling teeth for some people. Their also all necessary for a deeper joy and level of conciousness. The way Robert A. Johnson puts it, there are three levels to man. Simple two dimensional man, embodied by Don Quixote, three dimensional.man, where most modern people end up, embodied by Hamlet, and enlightened four dimensional man, embodied by Faust, who has faced his demons and been redeemed at the last.

IV. Aesthetically, hedonism is pretty skin deep. Art made purely for the sake of "looking good" generally only gets so far. Not that I don't appreciate cool sci-fi landscapes, or colorful glass sculptures, but you're not going to understand Giotto or Michaelangelo without some pain in your life. An aesthetic experience that is worth the trade off.

I don't get how anyone can be a pure hedonist. Pain is essential to personal growth, and pleasurable qualia are only part of what makes life worth living. I've seen this often phrased as the difference between happiness (the present experience of desirable sensations) versus joy (deep contentment) in religious discourse.

To quote James 1, 2-3.

"Consider it all joy, my brothers, when you encounter various trials, for you know that the testing of your faith produces perseverance. And let perseverance be perfect, so that you may be perfect and complete, lacking in nothing."

Of course, one of the more scientifically compelling answers to the mysteries is:

God: no
Free Will: no
Life after death: no

Conciousness is illusory, the subjective experience of a number of interrelated biological processes that actually occur with less interaction than we'd think intuitively. There is no central process, no "I" in "I think therefore I am." It's Hume's view of cognition, or even before him, the Buddhists. There is no Atman, there is just the illusion of an I. Sentience is an accident of evolution, and serves no real biological function either. More than that, it is illusory, an "after the fact" projection, the result of disperate systems trying to impose "meaning" on multiple streams of data.

This is supported by the fact that the experience of volition lags the start of movements. We begin to move, then experience the feeling of chosing to move shortly after. If you sever the main links between the hemispheres of the brain, and ask a person to write down their ideal job, each hand writes a different answer and the person is unaware of the discrepancy.

Living with someone with Alzheimer's, it's hard not to sometimes feel that the conciousness of even brilliant people isn't just an illusion projected by unrelated streams of data and feedback loops trying to impose order over behavior, including the internal behavior of thought and monologue.

If this is the case, I believe ethics really is trivial. You can meaningfully talk of ethics without God, but it's nonsense without free will, as is aesthetics. In that sense, the view just outlined does clear up some thorny philosophical issues, no?

I don't disagree with most of your points. The issue is that:

A. I doubt that neuroscience will produce satisfactory answers to some of these mysteries (e.g. the Hard Problem) in my lifetime. In the grand scheme of things, the answers may be forthcoming soon enough, but on a practical level, they'll likely come too late.

B. People are in need of help now, which again gets to the issue of answers coming too late for pressing practical needs.

C. I believe it's possible that science may be unsuited at the ontological level for answering certain questions about meaning, or providing an answer to the Hard Problem that isn't merely describing neural correlates. That is, science will be unable to formulate an answer to the Hard Problem in the same way it can't provide us with a means of ranking aesthetic value. If Descartes had been correct, and the subjective world was linked to the material solely through the pineal gland, it still wouldn't answer the questions we're really interested in.

Jung's theories on dreams have no support in science and I believe they can be safely discarded when looking through that lens. The symbolic narratives he weaves with them however, have aesthetic value. Reading novels can measurably enhance measures of empathy, but their chief value doesn't lie in that sliver of result that can be measured.

I work in public policy and we're constantly inventing catagories for things, new ontologies for data, new conceptions of processes. These don't correspond to anything material, and indeed the same categories or chart of accounts used to describe the complex actions of one city might be fairly useless for generalizing to others. However, the use of the categorical organizations enables more effective political leadership and beaurocratic action. I have a similar view of psychology as respects individual action and decision-making.

Psychology is the "discourse of the soul," and it should perhaps begin to stick more to that. Neurology is the "discourse of the sinew," and shouldn't be expected to have all the answers.

That's interesting, since I have the same academic background and slowly have been coming to the conclusion that neuroscience can currently tell us far less about conciousness than we'd like to know. I recall a bit of a splash at a conference years ago reaching me vicariously when someone pointed out in the midst of all the progress being lauded that we still have very little idea how anesthesia works, or even if it works at blocking pain, as opposed to immobilizing the patient and causing amnesia, because our knowledge of the "correlates of conciousness" is still so sparse.

I am willing to bet that modern psychiatric practices will one day seem as hapless as leeching. We don't map moods as they occur in the brain and treat patients with mood disorders through any sort of target approach. We identify drugs that will generally pass the BBB and effect activity at the synapse, attempt to give animals psychiatric conditions, load them up with said drugs, and run statical analyses on their behaviors.

Drugs aren't targeting "moods", they generally saturate the nervous system and are then declared effective or not based on survey and outcome data, without a true casual mechanism identified. Their use is so common that there are active levels of SSRIs in urban water supplies, enough to be a culprit in the developed world's plummeting testosterone levels, which in turn likely is a culprit in some incidence of mood disorders (granted, plastics, birth control pills, and obesity are the main culprits). However, causal links are elusive. I don't want to be misunderstood as anti-medication, I only want to underscore how little we know about how these drugs work as opposed to say, corticosteroids, and how much we use them despite that.

The newest improvement is the ability to correlate your DNA with the efficacy of drugs in similar patients, which is still a long way from a strong casual connection. Which isn't to say that psychiatric medicines can't be effective, but more that the science is clearly in its infancy and this is brutally demonstrated in the extremely harsh side effect profiles that are considered acceptable in anti-psychotics. It's hard to imagine the massive weight gain, disrupted endocrine system, malformed bone development in puberty, and general extreme sedation that these drugs cause being tolerated as side effects for diseases we actually understand well. I would hazard that they are viewed like the lobotomy when truly effective treatments are developed.

I guess I'm even less a behaviorist though, given the problems of replication in psychology. Priming has been torn down since I took social psychology. Implicit bias survives more due to political reasons than actual quality data trying it to useful real world predictions or effect sizes. Hell, the tests don't even meet common standards for predicting the same individuals' scores over several days.

Evolutionary psychology is worse. Here books full of hypotheses replace supported theories. Casual mechanism are a bridge too far.

I find neuroscience simultaneously fascinating and essential to any credible mind-body philosophy, and fairly useless, at least for now, in explaining higher order thought, moods, meaning (as in how semiotics can be understood through neural correlates), or the illnesses people around me suffer. Very much a science that is led by what it can measure, versus what it actually wants to ask.

The value in Jungian analysis, pastoral care, or depth analysis, is that it can speak to mental phenomenon and ideas in their own terms and help people develop their understanding of the meaning of their lives. You can throw philosophy into that boat too. The actual causal mechanisms for improved outcomes is even more murkey here, and will depend on the individual (you won't give an atheist pastoral care). However, in some ways what priests often do on a weekly basis is significantly more targeted than modern psychiatry, because it is interacting directly with pathological ideas and moods.

He was probably cheating and just reading the Bloom's Notes summaries...:grin:

I'd focus more of the morality of subjectivity. Is it moral to embrace actions based only in your own experiences, or should you strive to tie them to an external, objective world?

The "Golden Rule(s)" seem tied only to inner experience of actions. We technocrats know better, your actions need quantifiable results!

Well you got your answers:



Appears it is solved.

The management of the US dollar didn't double the price of GPUs right before I was planning on buying a new computer or getting one of the new Xbox/Sony consoles though. Damn crypto bubble is making even old video cards sell at 2x MSRP. Don't these people care about the real victims, those of use with copies of Cyberpunk 2077 collecting dust on our shelves because our hardware can't run it?

Thankfully, I actually have very little time for games so I'm content moving through a backlog stretching into the PlayStation 2 era that my crappy budget video card can still emulate fine.

Christianity has always been about doctrine. I feel like a lot of its problems come from taking the Bible, which is essentially a humanist text written by people of different cultures over a millenia, and subject it to logical analysis to find concrete axioms.

Jesus didn't come to provide a systematic system of thought and doctrine. He offered parables, not Platonic dialogues or Aristotelian analysis. So people seeking that level of doctrine have to invent it.

The Trinity can represent many things. Father, Mother, Child; Past, Present, Future; components of the psyche, etc.

I believe I understand the paradox in that sense. It seems to presuppose some sort of observer, other than God, who stands inside the limits of time and linearity who can see a before and after the material creation of man. But such an observer wouldn't exist, and I think it's not actually possible to talk about meaning and the existence of concepts/forms sans any observer.

From the hylomorphic perspective, the form of man could be eternal, having always existed as an aspect internal to God, but the occasion of individual men given that form would be a created event that happens withing linear time. I believe this would resolve the paradox too.

The question for hylomorphism is always "where do the forms come from" and if you already allow the existence of God who exists outside the created realm, that sounds like the best answer.

I'll just leave this here for the universalists. What color is the dress?



I personally choose to deny the existence of qualia, mostly because mind body philosophy can get dense and produces the qualia of confusion in me.

Dan Simmons has a pair of sci-fi books on just this topic. It imagined a transhumanist society on Earth, filled with plenty, as well as an even more evolved "posthuman" society of God-like humans recreating the Trojan War on Mars, with themselves as Greek gods. Kind of a techno-Illiad.

I don't know if I'd really recommend it. Hyperion, his sci-fi take on the Canterbury Tales is a lot better, but it has a ton of interesting ideas, it just doesn't come together, even with like 1,400 pages to do so.


---

Anyhow, thank you David for the thread. This is a very interesting topic. I don't have too much to add of my own. As a leader in local government I have to constantly balance murky utilitarian calculations with political feasibility. The transhumanist project has to work on a scale an order of magnitude greater.

I have my doubts. I'm just finishing up Will Durant's excellent history of classical Greece, and it's remarkable how similar their political problems are to those of modern Western democracies. It seems like there has been nothing new under the sun despite all the "progress."

It might just be that the idea offends me on a psychological level. The transhumanist project is like a reverse Tower of Babel, bringing heaven down to Earth. It reminds me of Dostoevsky's Grand Inquisitor or the Buddha's life before seeing death.

I recognize this is an old post, but the whole "all religions are fairy tales made to make people feel they have meaning," thing doesn't work with all cosmologies. You can, and likely are fairly irrelevant in the Sumerian cosmology, and face a pretty brutal cast of deities. Homer's shades in Hades long for their time on Earth and are pale echos of the beings they were. Not exactly comforting.

God is infinite. God is also omniscient, meaning God posseses perfect knowledge of all things to come. "Perfect" knowledge denote that nothing is left out, and so there would be no difference between the experience of something, and the knowledge of it before it happened. In this sense, God stands outside time, experiencing all things at once.

What is the difference between God perfectly knowing and experiencing man before man is created, and after? The physical act of creation? However, if we use ourselves as a reference (we are created in the image of God), we know that there is no direct action of the material world. There is only experience. And God's experience defies linearity.

I don't see a paradox. God stands outside time. All things always were and have been if we take omniscience as an attribute of God.

Fascinating thread. I don't have much to add, having only read Man and his Symbols and a good deal of Psychology and Alchemy.

A lot of Jung's ideas seem unfalsifiable to me. Pseudoscience seems to have a negative connotation. Plenty of philosophy would fit the definition as unfalsifiable, but that doesn't mean it lacks analytical value.

As someone who studied neuroscience in college, the emphasis on dreams in particular hits a discordant note, as evidence for dreams as a "voice of the unconcious" has failed to materialize. That said, I certainly have gotten benefits from recording and reflecting on my dreams, during which I relive old relationships and experiences. The weird confusion of time and relations had helped me relate to my father in law who suffers from Alzheimer's.

I did just start Jung's autobiography, which is very interesting as a highly, intensely reflective work by someone at the end of his life who put a lot of work into self analysis. Apparently this is actually the work where Jung gets most into his own religious convictions, but I'm just starting out and I actually think I'm going to put it down and read Man's Search for Meaning first since I see it so highly recommend and Frankl's logo therapy sounds interesting.

The idea of conceiving the Bible as a psychological took is deeply interesting to me. So much of Christian theology is centered around doctrine and applying logic to a humanist text. It seems backwards in some ways. The idea of a God that develops psychologically also makes a good deal of sense, although I know this predates Jung by over a century in the German pietists that influenced Hegel.

For me, Jung's work is all worth it just for the work of his student Robert A. Johnson. His books are a mixture of literary criticism and reader directed psychology and I've found them very helpful. They're also all about 100 pages so they are quick to get through.

An interesting addenda to the way capital allows you to do more work with less labor is theories on labor substitution. Major construction projects in the developing world still use manpower for tasks like excavating. It's not that place like India can't get backhoes or build their own, it's that labor is so cheap there that it is little incentive to modernize.

The problem is that increasing pay and safety for workers makes capital more appealing.

I don't believe so. People were always very ignorant. Go look at the graffiti of Pompeii or the descriptions of the crowds by Greek and Roman historians.

The difference today is the democratization of mass communication technologies (i.e the internet, particularly social media), which has allowed people to broadcast their idiocy more effectively. The media, rapidly losing income due to increased competition (the internet has lowered barriers to entry), and the increased ability of people to get news for free has slashed reporting budgets. The result is endless articles that end up at the top of generic, incognito mode/cookie free Google News feeds that are literally reporting on screen captures of Twitter. This creates a feedback loop, as idiots are given a bigger microphone and more incentive for their idiocy. A small minority of people use Twitter and of its users a small minority account for a huge amount of the posts. People lie about their backgrounds and troll as outrageous members of opposing social camps. It's a terrible substitute for interviews, but it is cheap, so it thrives.

However, people in developed nations are getting dumber. The Flynn Effect is the general rise of IQ in nations across the 20th century. The increases are very substantial. As nutrition, medicine, and access to the stimulus of education got better, intelligence rose measurably by wide margins.

That has since reversed. Across the developed world, IQ is decreasing. This isn't due to migration as some might claim. Due to intergroup differences in IQ, IQ is necessarily mapped to demographic groups. The children of native Europeans and "native" Americans is decreasing.

No casual mechanism has fully been identified. TV and computers could play a role. So could enviornments toxins. Male testosterone and sperm count has been plummeting mostly due to plastics, so such an effect wouldn't be unprecedented.

Still, the main hypothesis is dysgenics. Intelligence is highly heritable. Higher intelligence is now correlated with less reproduction, particularly for women. There are plenty of plausible hypothesis for this, and the effect size when estimated could be substantial enough to push intelligence down. That said, people today are solidly more intelligent (as measured by the tests we've developed) than they were a century ago.

The trend of wealthier people to start reporducing less and less as civilizations' exit their expansive phase shows up way back in ancient Greek writers. It may very well be a cyclical force in history. It's an impossible hypothesis to truly prove out, but historical examples abound of falling birth rates as societies hit higher levels of development (vis-a-vis surrounding civilizations).

Heard this several times. It is recency bias. The El Paso, Dayton, and Garlic festival shootings were right on top of each other. Las Vegas, etc.



Moneyed interest groups are part of it, but I'd argue not a huge part. The fire arms industry isn't THAT big. It's not like tech or oil. The security costs imposed by their business on other businesses is probably larger than their current net profits.

IMO it comes down to: (in rank order)

A. Identity. Somehow guns have become a pillar of Republicanism, and our politics are very tribal. Gun owning households went Trump in every state except Vermont I believe. It's part of conservative identity. Part of some forms of Christian identity. It's part of rural identity. That makes it more emotionally charged.

It also ties into individual identity. The average American male is almost 200lbs. 24% body fat in their early 20s. If you can't run a mile or do a pull up, a gun and a truck become valuable tokens for masculinity. The weapon itself is a signal of strength in one's ability to defend oneself, particularly because anyone can use it.

B. The US is a low trust society and getting more low trust due to political tribalism and very rapid demographic shifts. People's perceptions of the need for defense are driven more by trust than real crime. Assault weapons have boomed even as violent crime has plummeted. Last summer's civil unrest probably intensified this.

C. General feeling of crisis. Global warming is unaddressed. Massive sovereign debt. Sloppy half assed coup attempts. Terrorism. Candidates screaming fraud when they lose. If your world is unravelling, better to be armed.

D. Police response times on rural areas are very slow. There is a real practical value to a gun. Part of why I have them. The opiate epidemic has sent rural crime above the national average (ironically given the rhetoric, San Diego and other major cities with huge undocumented populations have below average crime). Gun violence is also way less common in rural areas. Our political system highly favors us rural voters. If something is less of an issue for us, it has less chance of being addressed (although this fails to hold for water pollution because the GOP has somehow tied getting posioned by industry and not caring about your land to masculinity: "drill baby drill!").


Tribal identity is the key to the political deadlock. Masculine identity is probably the key to the rise in assault weapon ownership and mass shootings.

I think researchers are sleeping on the plunge in young males' sexual activity in recent years, and the effects of the dynamics of internet dating. Inability to find mates is identified as a major factor in the radicalization of Islamist terrorists. Far-Right sites are awash in references to their poor prospects and the fear of "cuckolding," whilst "incel" is a common insult.

However, you do end up in a bit of infinite regress, since that begs the question, why are young men, but not women to nearly the same degree, seeing this drop off in relationships?

You can also add to the whole problem feelings of self worth. The modern economy is not producing a lot of jobs for people without degrees, yet a state worth of people, mostly low skilled competing for the same shrinking pool of jobs, comes into the market each year through migration. The result is low labor force participation, low wages, and high competition.

but how do you argue the case against someone who doesn't accept the power of rational persuasion?

Spinning roundhouse kicks? :chin:

There is a wide body of literature in the foreign policy and security studies fields that shows that norms (e.g. rule of law, honor culture, etc.) shape and constrain the use of force. Even when there is total state breakdown and no monopoly on force, not every battlefield regresses into the maximum apocalyptic scenes of say, the Liberian Civil War.

Philosophy shapes thoughts, which in turn shapes actions. Might makes right isn't necissarily the case even in warfare. I'd argue it's generally not the case in day to day life. Otherwise, after a lifetime of weight lifting and martial arts practice, I wouldn't wait in lines anymore.

For me the notable divide is that, though I find idealist thought more appealing, even recognizing deep truths in them, I spend 90% of my waking time thinking and acting in terms of substance. I'm a very failed Platonist.

I'm not aware of anything explicitly about this, but this is generally how citizenship in Greek city states worked. The polis' most important function was organizing common defense and a system of laws for adjudicating disputes and property rights.

This obviously shifted over time though. Athens during its "golden age" was using a significant portion of its annual income on public works and art. There were also social services including medicine provided for the poor in many Greek states.

I don't know how much the idea really equates to other areas. The Greeks, and later Rome had a key distinction between citizens and free foreigners living in their lands, or slaves.

For a lot of history civilizations essentially just defined citizenship as living in area controlled by a given monarch.

Certainly medieval thought framed the responsibilities of the state and citizens far more in religious terms and appeals to natural law vis-a-vis God's will than appeals to citizenship as a concept.

Re: Judaism and Hellenic thought, it's interesting to note that Plato's Theory of Forms has been discovered in Memphite Theology in Egypt a few centuries before Socrates. There was always a myth that Socrates had studied in Egypt, so there might be some truth there.

The transmigration of souls, central to many Gnostic variants, shows up in Greece far earlier. It's possible it made its way into Greek thought via the Orphic Cult, which in turn was influenced by Hindu thought. Certainly there is some striking similarities between Buddhism and Gnosticism. It could be convergent evolution, or influence.

Homer's Greeks had a vision of the soul much more like early Hebrew Sheol. A shade was a place shadow of a once living man.

Sometimes I wonder how much the Greeks really Hellenized the areas they conquered, as opposed to being variously Egyptized and Hinduized themselves over time.

The Bible came down as a single document at one point, but I know the individual stories are far older than the Tanakh. One of the earliest examples of writing is a clay fragment that has the Noah story on it. Some details are different, the Ark is more of a giant basket, but the animals coming "two by two," is in there.

Notably, it pre-dates historical evidence for Jews as a people existing by many centuries, going back really to the birth of writing and civilization in Mesopotamia.

Rereading this is an object lesson in why you shouldn't write multi-paragraph statements on your phone. Oh well.

Anyhow, I saw this recently. Maybe the moral problems will work themselves out as America becomes so unequal that living here is no longer preferable...


rocky mountain dharma center


If I was from Bangladesh, I'd take some umbrage with the UN though. Like, "why do I have to be the comparison bro?"

The event was planned and advertised across a variety of far right platforms, including 4chan's /pol/, 8kun, the_Donald, and greatawakening.win.

Aside from photos of their "load outs," i.e. the weapons they were going to bring in the lead up to January 6th, and lists of which lawmakers could be assasinated and would then be replaced by Republican lawmakers, was a constant stream or calls to use the platform as a launching point for the extermination of Jews, Blacks, transexuals, and other undesirables. It's pretty hard to spend any time on the far-right sites where planning for the event went on and not come across a torrent of calls for not just racial violence, but full genocide.

People live streamed the attack to these sites to choruses of calls for genocide, so your claim is frankly willfully ignorant at best. If you have an arrest record for hate crimes and stream your riot to hate sites, I think it's fair to say what your motives were.

It's an extremely popular conception of the world. Even if it has broken down at upon close analysis, it allows for enough practical answers that I don't think it's going anywhere any time soon.

I don't know that biology is generally considered to be "greater" than material. I'm not sure what you mean there. The popular take in biology, at least at the layman's, undergraduate level, is that biology is very much a material science. You only have to start questioning the material when you get to the fundementals of physics or mystery of subjective experience. This leaves plenty of places so safely explore.

If you have questions about biological processes, an answer based on materialism is probably what you're looking for, even if it is a polite fiction. It's really enough to get you to accurate predictions. As Dewey said, "truth is the end of inquiry."

Gotcha. Yes, there is a sense in which Gnosticism, or at least, some forms can be elitist, since with transmigration you are born into different bodies, and it is the ones with superior intellect that can grasp the Gnosis. Or for some forms of Gnosticism there is a hard line between psychic and pneumatic humans.